The title screen of Movietone’s report on the killing of Martin Luther King.
Photograph: British Movietone

One million minutes of historical video dating back to 1895 – from footage of a hover scooter floating on a cushion of air to Mussolini calling for world peace – have been uploaded onto YouTube.

In what is the largest upload of historical news content on the video-sharing platform to date, the Associated Press and British Movietone are to host a collection of 550,000 video stories on two YouTube channels.

The digitised archival footage includes coverage of political milestones and historical moments in sport, fashion, science and entertainment.

The channels will be continually refreshed with up-to-date contemporary footage, according to AP, offering a “view-on-demand visual encyclopedia”.

From grainy black-and-white newsreel clips of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, to more modern high-definition video of Taylor Swift “shaking it off” at Madame Tussauds alongside her new waxwork, it could take around two years to watch all of the footage.

The marriage of the film star and baseball hero DiMaggio drew a record crowd to a San Francisco court. Photographers took pictures of the happy couple and of Marilyn and Joe kissing, and as the groom drove their wedding car away.

The French always seem to be the first to come up with something bizarre in the fashion field, says the AP archive caption, “but when it comes to sunglasses – they really excel.” The designs include elephant glasses, nuts-and-bolts glasses, tennis glasses, bicycle glasses, pearl glasses and even brandy glasses. Très chic!

Harrowing pictures, including footage of dead bodies, show viewers the carnage wreaked by the Bhola cyclone in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Despite the worldwide relief effort, many survivors, the report says, are still near to starvation. This was taken a year before the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence.

Rare footage taken inside the maximum security wing of Durham prison, where three of the Great Train Robbers were held. The video shows a warden walking along a catwalk outside cells and prisoners sewing mailbags.

“Very often it’s the owner what leads a dog’s life,” says the voiceover, as he introduces a contraption to make the dogs think they are really running, “so the inventor of this little gadget deserves to be the benefactor of the human race.” The home exercises for Fido and Rover seem a bit of “all right”, while others seem to think they are going up the down escalator.

This footage shows a close-up of Barack Obama, then recently elected as US president, being painted on a matryoshka nested doll. It also includes interviews with Russians and their views on the new administration.

Modern footage from Iraq on the day that the country’s government announced there would be an official holiday due to a scorching heatwave. Temperatures that day had exceeded over 50C in some provinces.